Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

2022: the year in review!

Greetings, readers! I hope that 2023 is off to a good start in all of your various corners of the world!

Why talk about income?

As usual, I’m kicking off the year with a review of last year and how it went in my freelance business. Also as usual, this article contains real income numbers from my business; if this bothers you or you find it tacky, no pressure to read on. I provide this information for a simple reason: because I teach classes on how to make money, and on how to make more money, as a freelancer. Personally, when I take those types of classes from other people, I want to know their real income numbers, because I like to know:

  • When someone says “a low/high/decent/solid income,” I want to know what they mean. 25K? 200K?
  • When someone talks about charging what I would consider a high rate, I want to know how much work they have at that level: are they charging high rates, but finding very few clients at that rate, or do they have a steady flow of work at that rate?

I also realize that some people find it weird, in poor taste, or “a sign of someone desperate for attention” to talk about one’s real income numbers. If that’s your feeling, no problem, and no pressure to read this article. That being said, let’s dive in!

Executive summary: things went well!

2022 was a good year. It was my first full calendar year of offering both interpreting and translation, and although (due to the loosening of COVID restrictions) I took a lot more vacation this year than in 2020 or 2021, my income didn’t decrease and I did a lot of interesting work. I’m happy with the scale-back in the number of courses offered by Training for Translators. I moved to a new office (my first time renting a small private office within a larger co-working space) and I love it. And yet, I have some bigger goals for 2023.

By the numbers

As I expected and similar to the past three years, I earned US $110K this year. That’s gross income, but after subtracting subcontracting payments: it doesn’t include revenue that I took in that was then immediately paid to other people—specifically, instructors for Training for Translators.

The 110K was divided almost exactly into thirds: one third interpreting, one third translation, one third teaching, writing, and consulting. I’m happy with that. The “triathlon” aspect of my business is diverse enough that there’s some resilience in the system (when one thing is down, often another thing is up), but not so diverse that I feel scattered. I’m hoping to maintain this distribution of revenue in 2023. An interesting distribution within this distribution is that the majority (23K) of my interpreting income came from agencies, while the majority (31K) of my translation income came from direct clients and individuals.

Interpreting

As mentioned above, this was my first full calendar year as an interpreter, after passing the Glendon MCI exit exams in July 2021. I love interpreting and am really glad that I pursued the degree at Glendon. In 2022, I interpreted a total of 165 days, or rather “days,” since a court interpreting “day” is sometimes 10 minutes. Of the 165 assignments, 113 were court and 52 were conference. Conference interpreting can be a tough world to break into, and I was very lucky to receive some excellent referrals from very generous colleagues. Overall, after hearing stories of people who spent more than a year looking for work after finishing a conference interpreting degree, I’m happy with my 52 assignments, and it’s definitely a goal to find more conference interpreting work for 2023.

Translation

Basically status quo, which is OK. I continued working for my regular direct clients, primarily US-based NGOs doing development work in francophone Africa, plus a few law firms. I like my translation clients and they seem to like me, but one of my longstanding NGO clients is wrapping up the project I’ve translated for (for five years!), so I’d definitely like to find another client to flesh things out.

Online courses

Some significant shakeups here. At the start of COVID, everyone was so hungry for online training that all of my online courses were selling out, some even with a waiting list. Over time, things slowed down significantly, particularly when it came to longer, more expensive classes. I also realized that I’m not particularly good at, nor do I particularly enjoy, the administrative aspects of running a large-scale online training business. So, I decided to go back to basics, focusing on one master class per month taught by me. This has gone really well. Signups have been good, the money I earn is almost all profit (as opposed to paying a host and other instructors), and I love teaching. I’m happy with this reorganization and plan to stick with it, offering courses taught by other people only on an occasional basis.

Vacation and expenses

This was the first year since 2019 that (finally) felt pretty normal in terms of travel and vacation. I definitely took advantage of that; my husband and I spent most of July on a mountain bike road trip through British Columbia, Alberta, and the Tetons, we did a bunch of long weekend ski trips, and we spent two separate weeks mountain biking in Utah while working a little bit, plus spent New Year’s in Mexico with my college student daughter and her girlfriend. No complaints in the travel department this year.

My business expenses were fairly stable, with the exception that my office rent increased slightly (to $586 per month) because I jumped on the chance to rent a small private office for only $36 a month more than I was paying for a desk in my co-working office. The only issue is that I love having my own office instead of having to reserve a conference room every time I have a remote interpreting assignment, so I don’t see myself giving it up next year, even if the rent increases.

Goals for 2023

I’d like to:

  • Slightly increase my income, with a goal of around 120K, largely because I want to do more traveling that will cost money
  • Find at least one more interpreting client with regular work
  • Publish at least one new book (I’m working on an interpreting version of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator that I hope to publish this year)
  • Translate another book (this is in the works; something in the public domain that I would self-publish)
  • Continue teaching monthly master classes for Training for Translators
  • On the personal side, I’m starting cello lessons while continuing to play the lute; stay tuned (haha!) on progress

Wishing all of you all the best for a healthy and prosperous 2023!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!


Corinne McKay

A test of Cymo Booth as an interpreting back-channel

Boothmate communication in remote interpreting

The vast majority of my conference interpreting work is remote, so I’m always on the lookout for ways to make the online interpreting experience more pleasant for me and more effective for my clients. I actually really enjoy remote interpreting, but one of the main challenges when you’re not sitting in a booth together is communicating with boothmates. 

On a basic level, you have to agree on the handover procedure (how to organize the switch from one interpreter to another) and the duration of shifts. It’s also helpful to be able to ask or answer terminology questions, send your partner a tip about something you heard that they missed, reshuffle who is going to interpret what, and other communication issues. 

My least favorite way of doing this is via the in-meeting (Zoom, WebEx, etc.) chat. This method comes with several drawbacks and risks:

  • One can easily send a message to the wrong person (or even to the entire meeting!)
  • The chat is often busy with messages from meeting participants, so every time you see a red dot, it’s difficult to know whether someone is messaging you specifically
  • There is little to no flexibility with settings and workflow (enabling/disabling audio notifications, using video)
  • What if the platform freezes, or your boothmate’s connection drops, or you and your boothmate(s) find yourselves in different virtual rooms? The team is left scrambling for a means of communication

For these reasons, I much prefer using an external communication platform (bonus points for interpreter-specific features!).

What I had been using…

It’s possible to use an external video channel such as a (second) Zoom meeting, FaceTime, Skype, etc., but this can require an additional device, and none of these video conference tools have interpreter-specific features such as a handover button (one click that lets your boothmate know that it’s time to switch). 

It’s worth mentioning that of course, a potential solution would be for the client to use a videoconferencing platform that has interpreting features built in. There are plenty of them out there (Kudo, Interprefy, etc.), but they don’t seem to have a lot of uptake among my clients, and more than 90% of my interpreting work is over Zoom, Webex, or similar online platforms. 

The default back-channel communication method, at least among the interpreters I work with, is WhatsApp, probably because:

  • Nearly every interpreter is already on WhatsApp
  • You can choose whether to just do messaging, or to do a video call 
  • WhatsApp has automatic sound alerts (a “ping” tone when someone messages you) that can be helpful when you’re already trying to watch the conference presentation, the in-meeting chat, your reference documents, your terminology resources, etc. 

But still, WhatsApp has its issues. Of course, it has no interpreter-specific features. Many people don’t like to use it for security reasons and because it’s associated with Facebook/Meta, and from the online privacy/security standpoint, it has access to your contacts. Additionally, you have to do some fiddling with WhatsApp’s settings in order not to get notifications from other people while you’re working.

Enter Cymo Booth

Amélie Roy, a buddy from the Glendon College Master of Conference Interpreting program, and one of my most trusted boothmates, recently asked if I’d be willing to try Cymo Booth, which bills itself as “The Zoom back channel for professional interpreters.” My first reaction was, I’m interested, but do we really need to install and learn to use yet another tool? However, Amélie assured me that Cymo Booth was super user-friendly and that I could try it with literally one click: only one interpreter, the virtual booth host, needs to have a Cymo Booth account, and the other(s) just click(s) on the link to access the virtual booth. After a short test (Amélie had done more extensive testing on her own), we decided to try Cymo Booth for our upcoming assignment, with WhatsApp (our previous go-to) open in the background as plan B. 

After this first test run of Cymo Booth, I can say that I love it! That’s the executive summary. Essentially, Cymo Booth allows you to:

  • See your partner if you want to (or you can keep the camera off)
  • Talk to your partner if you want to (or you can turn the mic off)
  • Message your partner using either pre-set messages (“Mic on”) or by typing your own messages (you can configure new pre-set messages or just type whatever you want)
  • Send a handover cue with one click 
  • Adjust your boothmate’s output volume on Cymo Booth, which means that you can listen to both the meeting audio and your boothmate’s audio at your desired relative volume (instead of being stuck with the preset relative volume in Zoom or using a separate audio mixer tool)
  • Do all of the above in the background; your use of Cymo Booth will be invisible to the client and the other meeting participants. 

So, while we were interpreting in Zoom, Amélie and I could hear each other and message each other in Cymo Booth. We didn’t use video while interpreting, but turned our cameras on to chat with each other during breaks in the event we were interpreting for. 

Cymo Booth’s advantages

Here’s what I love about Cymo Booth:

  • It’s a very lightweight, non-invasive program; it didn’t interfere with the sound settings for any of my other software (as has happened with other back-channel solutions)
  • All of the features worked on the first try – no bugs
  • Using Cymo Booth helps you avoid last-minute channel-switching in Zoom. This is something that makes more sense if you’ve interpreted in Zoom, and it’s one of those small thing/big thing issues (details below, skip this part if you already understand the concept of channel-switching!). 

In Zoom, if you want to listen to your partner, you have to set your outgoing channel to the opposite language from theirs; so for example if your partner is interpreting into French, you have to set your outgoing channel to English in order to set your incoming channel to French (the incoming and outgoing channels can’t be the same). You definitely want to do this at least once during your partner’s turn, to make sure that their sound is good. But if you stay on the “wrong” channel for your partner’s entire shift, you risk forgetting to switch to the correct outgoing channel when it’s your turn. This sounds like a stupid, easy-to-avoid mistake, and it is, but (believe me), RSI involves so many cognitive tasks that basically every interpreter who does RSI has ended up interpreting on the wrong channel at one point or another. Using Cymo Booth gives you the option of quickly checking your partner’s sound in Zoom, then switching your Zoom settings back to the ones you want for your interpreting shift, while continuing to listen to your partner in Cymo Booth. You can also keep an eye (visually) on Zoom to make sure that your partner is not muted and is on the correct channel. 

  • You can mute and un-mute your partner in Cymo Booth. Again, this seems like a small thing, but it’s really helpful to not disturb your boothmate to ask them to mute or unmute. Just mute or un-mute them by right-clicking on their video panel (whether or not their video is on)
  • I found Cymo Booth’s messaging interface really well-designed. The font is very easy to read, your and your partner’s messages appear in different colors, and if you close down the chat panel in Cymo Booth, the messages appear as pop-ups in front of your Zoom window, which is really helpful if your partner is messaging you something critical, like “She said 10 thousand, not 10 million.” 

In short, I found that Cymo Booth resolves a lot of the nagging issues with other common back-channels. It’s “donationware” (don’t worry, I donated!), which means that there’s no obligatory cost, but you make a donation of your choice after you use the software. Personally, I prefer the simplest tool that gets the job done: communication between interpreters doesn’t require a million features. I found that for my tastes, Cymo Booth is that least-complicated yet interpreter-comprehensive option, and I’m looking forward to using it again!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!


Corinne McKay

The books I read this year

To close out 2022 and in case you’re looking for some holiday reading, here’s a list of the books I read this year and a short review of each one. I hope that all of you get some well-deserved time off to enjoy the people and activities that make you happy!

I read 13 books this year, and I have two on deck for my holiday break, spanning the full range from current events, to humor, to really good novels:

1. Crossroads, a novel by Jonathan Franzen. At almost 600 pages, you’re not going to read this in a day, but it’s so worth it. The summary of this book is pretty unassuming: basically a day in the life of a family in the American mid-west. But I don’t even know where to start with how good this book is. Perhaps it particularly resonated with me because it’s about middle-aged parents with young adult children (my life in a nutshell), but I stayed up way too late reading this book. Highly recommended!

2. The Impossible First, a non-fiction outdoor adventure book by Colin O’Brady. Now here’s a book that you probably could read in a day, or at least a weekend. It’s the story of extreme adventurer Colin O’Brady’s solo crossing of Antarctica, an incredible story and he’s a good writer. Recommended!

3. The Man in the High Castle, a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. I’m admittedly a little late to the party, as this book was published in 1962, but I got completely hooked on the TV miniseries based on the book, which prompted me to read it. Philip K. Dick’s stuff is weird, no way around it, but the premise of this book is fascinating: what would the U.S. have looked like if Germany and Japan had won World War II? Recommended!

4. The Pale-Faced Lie, a memoir by David Crow. This book was recommended by a fellow volunteer on a trip I took with our animal rescue group to the Navajo Nation. It’s really well written and really hard to read: an intense story of a highly dysfunctional family (think The Glass Castle) but with the added dysfunctionality that the abusive family patriarch is essentially pretending to be Native American. Recommended, as long as you have a high tolerance for really heartbreaking family stories.

5. The Other Dr. Gilmer, a memoir by Benjamin Gilmer. I heard the author of this book interviewed on NPR and immediately ordered it. It’s a fascinating story of a doctor named Gilmer, who goes to replace another doctor named Gilmer (no relation) at a rural health clinic, after the original Dr. Gilmer goes to prison for brutally murdering his own father. No spoilers, but the plot is fascinating: part medical mystery, part psychological thriller, part analysis of the criminal justice system. Highly recommended!

6. Chatter, a non-fiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe. I read this book because I love everything Patrick Radden Keefe writes, and I was trying to bide time while waiting for him to hopefully write another book. The book is about global government eavesdropping, and I’d say it’s very interesting but also pretty outdated. The book was published in 2005 and the author did a lot of the research while he was a grad student in the UK in the late 90s, so the information is more than a bit dated by now. Recommended if you really like this author, but otherwise probably only of interest if you’re really into government spying.

7. Olav Audunsson: Vows, a novel by Sigrid Undset, translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally. Oh my gosh, folks. Oh. My Gosh. Talk about a book I never in a million years would have picked up, except that I was a reader for a literary translation competition and I impulsively picked it, and I immediately became obsessed. I had honestly never heard of Sigrid Undset (she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928), and I had heard of Tiina Nunnally but never read any of her translations. This epic novel (published in multiple volumes: see below) is set in medieval Norway and it’s just amazing. Family drama, mental illness, church/state struggles, dynastic struggles…this book has it all, and the translation is just amazing. Highly recommended!

8. Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, a memoir by Seamas O’Reilly. Another NPR pick, an easy read, and one of those funny/sad books that I tend to really like. O’Reilly is a columnist for the Guardian, The Irish Times, and other publications, and this book chronicles his childhood in a family of 11 children, focusing particularly on his mother’s death from cancer and the aftermath, in which his father is left to raise the family alone. Recommended!

9. Olav Audunsson: Providence, a novel by Sigrid Undset, translated by Tiina Nunnally. The second volume in the Olav Audunsson series! Highly Recommended!

10. Thanks for Waiting, a memoir by Doree Shafrir. I think this was a recommendation in Real Simple magazine? Maybe? It’s a memoir by a middle-aged woman who’s a self-proclaimed “late bloomer,” focusing on her career, meeting her life partner, and having a child. She’s a good writer, but to be totally honest, I agree with a reviewer of this book who said it’s basically 280 pages of “dating in New York is horrible and infertility is tough.” Perhaps I just don’t identify with those experiences, but I would skip this one unless the subject matter really resonates with you.

11. The Stolen Year, a non-fiction book by Anya Kamenetz. Another NPR pick! It’s a book about the effect of the pandemic on American children; to be honest, I’m not really sure why I bought it, other than that I generally love NPR’s recommendations. But this has the distinction of being the only book on the list that I didn’t finish; the book is really well written, well researched, and honestly fascinating, but I just was not in the frame of mind to read 350+ pages about how awful the pandemic was for kids. I loved the NPR interview with the author but the book was more on the topic than I wanted to read. Highly recommended if you’re an education researcher or similar!

12. Any Other Family, a novel by Eleanor Brown. I think this was another Real Simple pick. The plot of this novel is really interesting: four children from one birth mother who are adopted by three sets of parents, who then form an “intentional family” around the kids. It’s an easy read, and I liked the description of family dynamics in complicated situations. Recommended!

13. Happy Go Lucky, a humor book by David Sedaris. This book is a compilation of essays by David Sedaris, whose writing I’ve loved for a long time. As usual, it’s a combination of stuff that’s actually funny, with things that are decidedly not funny (his sister’s suicide and his father’s slow death from natural causes). Most people either like his writing or they don’t, so that’s my recommendation: read it if you like David Sedaris, because it’s pretty similar to his other books of personal essays.

On deck! I’m taking two weeks off over Christmas and New Year’s, so I have two books ready to read:
-The third volume of the Olav Audunsson series (as I said, I’m obsessed!), and The Ransomware Hunting Team, a non-fiction book about cyber counterterrorism by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden. This is another NPR pick by two reporters at Pro Publica and I’m excited to read it!

That’s it for 2022; Training for Translators will be taking a break until January 6 and I’ll talk to you after that! Happy holidays and thanks for your support throughout the year.

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!


Corinne McKay

How to prepare for and pass an interpreting exam: master class on Tuesday!

The final Training for Translators master class of 2022 is on Tuesday, December 6. I’ll be teaching How to prepare for (and pass!) an interpreter certification exam. Based on my experience preparing for and passing (on the first try!) three sets of interpreting exams, this 90-minute class will help you create a training plan for any type of interpreting exam and set yourself up for success on exam day.

Registration is $60 and includes the recording, and the live class runs from 12 noon to 1:30 New York time. I hope to see you there! After this class, T4T will take a break until mid-January, when Meghan Konkol and I will kick off 2023 with a master class on Translating for the international development sector.


Corinne McKay

Freelance tasks to do before January 1

Freelance tip: Two financial tasks to think about before the end of the year, so that they’re in place for January 1.

1️⃣ Are your business and personal finances completely separate? If they’re commingled, I’m begging you (literally, begging you), at least create a separate checking and savings account that you use only for business. Don’t be that person who gets audited and has to comb through every transaction, wondering if it was business, or personal. Separate accounts make it much easier to determine how much you made and how much you spent, and you can immediately redirect a certain percentage (I do 40%) of every payment into savings, to pay your taxes, pay yourself when you take vacation, buy a new computer, attend a conference, etc.

2️ Think about whether you should incorporate. In the U.S., if you’re a sole proprietor (the default business structure if you’re not incorporated), you pay self-employment tax on every cent that you make. That’s a big hit: 15.3%, to be exact, *on top of* what you would pay in taxes if you worked for an employer. This is because you pay the employER and the employEE portions of the Social Security and Medicare taxes.

Incorporating isn’t a trivial decision. In most states, it’s easy and cheap to form a corporation (check your state’s Secretary of State website), but the hitch comes when you may be required to file quarterly payroll taxes and a separate corporate tax return, and the penalties for not doing so can be steep.

However, incorporating allows you to *legally* avoid paying self-employment tax on some of what you earn. Even if you are the corporation’s only employee, you can legally allocate some of your income to yourself as wages (subject to self-employment tax), and some of your income to the corporation as profit (not subject to self-employment tax). In my case, having an S-Corp saves me about $6,000 in taxes per year, which in turn covers the rent on my office. Since I hate working from home, it’s a good tradeoff. Definitely speak with an accountant who has small business expertise if you are thinking about incorporating!

Thinking about these issues *now* will get you prepared for January 1, rather than having your accounting or business structure patched together throughout the year!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!